Why customers choose SAP Partners – Expert Knowledge

To follow my last posted blog exploring the reasons why customers chose a SAP Partner, today the focus is on the importance of expert knowledge.

Everyone wants to be an expert. However, to achieve expertise requires more than simply being involved in something Expertise comes at a price and people go to extreme lengths because they have a passion, a that passion drives them.

Stevenage Borough Council had already been using SAP BusinessObjects Edge Business Intelligence (BI) software before the scorecard initiative. They use the SAP software as a strategic tool to infuse the data with more context and meaning. “Key metrics are reviewed quarterly by the council’s executive to identify and flag issues,” says Paul Tyler, Business and Knowledge Systems Manager at the council. “These metrics are then presented in easy-to-view dashboards.”

Greater visibility and transparency

“With SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, we have greater visibility and transparency throughout the organization – we can easily determine how the council is performing. Officials can prioritize actions and increase performance in areas needing improvement. One council member made the comment that the dashboard provides ‘council performance at a glance.’ When an elected official says that, you know you have achieved what you set out to do.”

Stevenage had the data, but not a way to visualize and present it. The SAP BusinessObjects gold partner, Contemporary, has nearly two decades of business intelligence consulting, training, and product expertise. It saw that Stevenage had strong in-house IT skills but didn’t have any experience using SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards.

“Contemporary’s expertise and knowledge was invaluable. Without it, the project would have taken much longer,” Tyler says. “Contemporary worked with us rather than for us. This was incredibly important to achieve the knowledge transfer and deliver the training our people needed to complete the project on a tight deadline. We started in April, and we had to report the quarter’s performance at a council meeting in June.”

“In five days, Contemporary built 25% of the scorecard dashboards and trained our staff how to use SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards to build the other 75%,” says Tyler. “We can now create the dashboards and support the software ourselves – this saves us money, as external consultants cost much more than internal IT.”

More than 10,000 SAP Partners like Contemporary work as local and expert resources for thousands of SME customers. They offer breadth of coverage across products and services, as well as extensive industry experience.